zik “yes”
I don’t know if this was included in the films; I hope not. I’d prefer to treat it as apocryphal, for the simple reason that I don’t like it (with this meaning).

lû “no”
Obviously related to lu “not.”

ammanizu
ammanizun
mammanizu
mammanizun
Four ways of saying “thank you” depending on the number of people on whose behalf it is said and the number of recipients. From the root √m-m-n “think well of, show gratitude to,” in the forms 1s. imperfect ammani and 1p. imperfect mammani, combined with the 2sm. suffix -zu or 2pm. -zun.

fund, pl. fanâd “elf”
Presumably a borrowing from something like *pend-, an Avarin (Nelyarin) cognate to *kʷend-, but with vowels adapted to the model of khuzd pl. khazâd.

ithmir b’tîr
“Get away from there”bi: preposition “from, away from” (a location at or nearby something, not from inside it)tîr: “there, that place” — usually of a place nearby or within reach; cf. yîr “there yonder” (sc. in the distance, though still visible) and kûr “where?”

idribtu, pl. idribîtu
“stop it”
Imperative of root √d-r-b, with 3s suffix -tu; as mentioned, this should now be -hu.

Ikhf’ id-ursu khazâd
“Feel the fire of the dwarves”ikhfi: imperative of √kh-f, “receive, accept,” elided to ikhf’ before another word beginning with i-id-ursu: “the fire (of)” the noun urus “fire” with a definite accusative prefix id- and a connecting (construct) suffix -u.khazâd: “dwarves,” plural of khuzd

Igribî ‘b-bekâr d’zun
“Arm yourselves”igribî: imperative plural of √g-r-b “take, seize”ib-bekâr: “the weapons,” elided to ‘b-bekâr after a long î. Bekâr is the plural of bekar “weapon,” but the plural is more often used. Ib is the same definite accusative prefix as id-, but assimilated to the following consonant.d’zun: contracted from du-zun “for yourselves” (preposition du “to, for”, -zun “you plural”).

Du-bekâr!
“To arms!”du “to,” bekâr “arms”

Gelekh d’ashrud bark
“Time to swing an axe”gelekh: “time, occasion” from the root √g-l-kh “happen, occur (punctually)”d’ashrud: du “for” + ashrud, gerund (or infinitive) of the verbal root √sh-r-d “wield, control.” On second thought I wonder if this should have been ashrudu, part of a construct formation with bark: “for the wielding of an axe.”bark: axe

M’imnu Durin
“In Durin’s name”mi: “by, with (some instrument)”; elided to m’ before another word starting with i-imn: “name”; construct form imnuDurin: proper name, in Mannish form, of the progenitor of the Dwarves; his true name would not be used above ground, or where non-Dwarves could hear it.

Nê ikrid ûdar!
“Never trust a wizard”nê: “don’t” — a negative particle used with injunctions or other non-real expressions. Lu negates things that are happening or have happened; nê negates hypotheticals, things that would happen or might happen or haven’t happened yet.ikrid: imperative singular of √k-r-d “believe, trust”ûdar: “wizard,” literally “knower,” from the root √y-d-r “know, be wise” placed in the uCCaC pattern. *uydar > *uwdar > ûdar; or perhaps the historically original root was √w-d-r after all.

Imrid amrad ursul!
“Die a death of flames”imrid: imperative sg. of √m-r-d “die”amrad: abstract noun from the same rootursul: adjective “of flames, flaming, fiery” with -ul suffix added to urus “flame, fire,” with syncope of the stem (urus > urs-). The root is √ʔ-r-s “fire, burn”

Urus d’zun!
“Fire upon you!”d’zun: contracted from duzun (stressed on the second syllable), from the preposition du “to, for” + the suffix –zun “you (masculine plural).”
I’m not sure of the context here, but most likely this should be dumên, not duzun, as the Dwarves tended to refer to their enemies using a (contemptuous) familiar form.

Ikhfitu!
“Take that!”ikhfitu: imperative ikhfi from the root √kh-f “take, receive” + 3ms. suffix –tu. As noted in a previous post, the neuter suffix –hu had not been invented at this stage, and should really be used instead of –tu here: Ikhfihu!

Of various roots which could be translated “take,” √kh-f means “accept something given or dealt to one” (not necessarily something beneficial) and √g-r-b means “grasp or seize,” often, though not necessarily, with the implication that the thing taken is in another’s possession, and is relinquished unwillingly.

Irsir!
“Burn!”
Singular imperative of the simple (intransitive) verb from the √ʔ-r-s root.

Some more material prepared for The Hobbit, from the early stages of production. I present the forms exactly as I first wrote them, with some suggested emendations based on later developments.

Lu akraditu!
“I don’t believe it!”lu: “not”, a general negating particleakraditu: root √krd “believe, trust”; akradi “I believe”; -tu 3ms. suffix
Obviously that should really mean “I don’t believe him.” Originally — at the time I wrote this line — I didn’t have a masculine/neuter contrast, but at a later date I added the neuter suffix -hu, which would be more correct -hu: akradihu. I don’t know if this line ever actually was used in the film.

Smaug mamarda
“Smaug is dead.”mamarda: root √mrd “die”; past participle mamard, used as a stem to which perfect endings (in this case -a, the 3sm.) are added.

Anthân lu sharagên
“Omens do not lie”anthân: “sign, omen” a feminine noun that I intended to be both singular and plural. However, going by similar patterns I used later, it should have been anathân as a plural. The root is √nthn “point out.”sharagên: root √shrg “to lie, to say a falsehood”, perfect stem with 3pf. ending -ên.

Karâk Urdekul
“Ravens of Erebor”kark, pl. karâk: “raven:urdekul: genitive/adjectival form formed by adding -ul to the name Urdek “Lonely Mountain” = urd “mountain” + êk, shortened form of ayik “alone, single, lonely.” I should have written Urdêk, Urdêkul.

Mafarrakh d’afrukh
“A burden to carry”mafarrakh: habitual past participle of √frkh “carry,” here used as a noun: “thing habitually carried” > burden.du: “to, for (the purpose of)”; here elided to d’ before a word beginning with a vowel.afrukh: gerund “carrying” from √frkh

Lu mafrad d’abkâr
“Not fit for a fight”mafrad: “prepared, ready” from the root √frd “prepare, make ready.” This is a different participial form, indicating some present state, so literally “being (now) prepared.”abkâr: “fight, strife, battle” from √bkr “fight”; the word abkâr “a fight,” delimited in space and time, can be distinguished from the more abstract gerund abkur “fighting.”

I get a lot of questions about particular lines of dialogue in The Hobbit films, requests to translate and so forth. I would like to comply, but unfortunately I don’t have a complete script of all the films, or even DVDs, and even under the best of conditions it would be difficult to figure out which of the lines I contributed were actually used, and if so, where.

So I’m going to start doing the next best thing. I will start recording all of the lines I wrote for the film on this blog, with some analysis, though I may have to trade off thoroughness for quantity.

So here’s a start, with some of the Dwarvish lines, since these tended to be earlier and may, I guess, be a little more interesting than some of the other languages.

Urâd Zirnul
“Iron Hills”
Root √ʔrd, singular urd “hill”, pl. urâd
Root √zrn, zirin “iron” (the metal) + adjectival ending -ul, with syncope of zirin > zirn.
I think this may never have been used in the films, and if so, might be considered slightly apocryphal. I would probably think twice about using the same word for both Erebor and the Emyn Engrin. Unless, from the Dwarvish perspective, the term relates not to the size of the rock visible above ground, but the extent of the caverns delved out underground.

Ifthuzirin
“Ironfoot”
Nominal root √ʔfth “foot” > ifth “foot.” The following -u is not the objective ending, but rather a (rarely seen) construct ending which links it to a following noun taken as a genitive or attributive.Ifthu-zirin = “foot-of-iron.”

One of the most common questions I’ve been asked about neo-Khuzdul is “what does Gimli say to Haldir?” This has been asked since the release of The Fellowship of the Ring way back in 2001. With the release of The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug last year, the question was revived in the form “what does Thorin say to Thranduil?”

The answers are a bit embarrassing to me for three different reasons.

First, it’s not a line I wrote. I was asked to come up with a curse for John Rhys-Davies, playing Gimli, to utter in the scene in Lothlórien. What I came up with was embarrassingly insipid and weak — I think because I was (and still am) a bit squeamish about real profanity, even in a language that nobody could understand. After all, some day I was going to have to explain this, possibly to audiences containing small children; and I’ve just never been very good at profanity, even if I can appreciate the kind of torrent of lyrical invective which is, alas, so very rare these days. So I just rendered “a great darkness upon you Elves” into the kind of Khuzdul I was producing then:

Gabil-narga ai-mênu Kanâd!

Of course, I’ve changed neo-Khuzdul quite a bit since then, and if I were to do it today, it might come out as:

Aznân gabil ai-fnadumên!

Where we see a bit of colloquial Khuzdul syncope. The elements are much the same, but the word for “elf” changed when I realized that the first Elves that the Dwarves would have encountered would probably have been of Telerin origin, or Avari closely related to the Teleri, calling themselves some version of *Pendi.

This is not, of course, anything that ever appeared on film or was recorded in the first place. This leads to my second embarrassment:

I had no idea what the line John Rhys-Davies uttered meant for over a decade. I don’t even know how it came to be filmed that way; a story that I heard was that he ad-libbed it on set, being unable to produce the line I wrote for one reason or another. But that is a second-hand or third-hand story, or worse, and if he has a different story to tell about it, it supersedes anything I have to say on the subject. What I always said when I was asked was that I assumed it was so unspeakably nasty as to be untranslatable — at least in polite company!

I didn’t even know exactly what he had said, much less its meaning. So when I finally got asked about it by the scriptwriter I had to find the scene and listen to it over and over and over again before I came up with:

[ɪʃˈkɑkʰʍi ɑɪ duˈrugnul]

Well, that may be Khuzdul, but it’s not my Khuzdul, and even includes a sound that I excluded from neo-Khuzdul — any variation of /w/. But when I heard that there was consideration of having Thorin use the same curse, I thought “Aha! Here’s a chance to deal with all of those questions, and the additional ones to come.” So I sat down and reverse-engineered (so to speak) a Khuzdul version from Rhys-Davies line, using my grammar and phonology.

What I came up with was:

îsh kakhfêai-‘d-dûr-rugnul

îsh fit in well with my overall scheme for imperatives, CiCiC; it could come from a root ʔAYAŠA or *ʔAWAŠA ([j] regularly substitutes for /w/ before a vowel in Longbeard Khuzdul). ʔAWAŠA is reminiscent of English “wash,” and suggests a meaning “pour out, pour down, pour over.”

kakhf (f substituting for ʍ, since I had no /w/-type sound) is reminiscent of Latin cacāre, and so I decided that it must mean excrement or fæces.

–ê was the already-existing first person singular possessive.

ai we already knew meant “upon”.

So what was “durugnul”? Obviously it had to refer to the Elves in some way. But it had to be bitterly contemptuous, in a peculiarly Dwarvish way. It should go beyond the usual reflections on intelligence, sanity, sexuality and personal hygiene that are the backbone of so many English curses.

After quite a lot of thought (more than I like to admit to) I came up with the compound dûr-rugn. On the face of it, this isn’t much of an insult. Dûr simply means bare, naked, or uncovered, from a root √DAYARA (*√DAWARA) “strip, shave, make naked”; rugn (plural ragân) is the lower jaw (or chin). Dûr-rugnul is an adjectival form (here used substantively, preceded by the definite object marker id-) meaning “bare-chinned” or more literally “with naked (hairless) lower jaw.”

It is, Tolkien wrote, “characteristic of all Elves to be beardless” (Unfinished Tales, p. 247); but all adult Dwarves, male and female, have beards of which they are very proud. Only a very young Dwarf, or one who had suffered some tragic injury or illness, would lack a beard.

The beardlessness of Elves would therefore appear comic to the Dwarves, a sign that they were at best infantile, and would be an obvious subject of mockery; it might also suggest that they lacked the gonads (of either sex) to produce a proper beard. At any rate, to go about with a bare chin must appear to the Dwarves to be shameful, all the worse for the fact that the Elves appear unconscious of their shame, or even proud of it.

Of course, when walking in the world, a Dwarf generally keeps such thoughts to himself; but they are apt to be let loose when under stress or when angry. So we find both Gimli and Thorin using this crude Dwarvish surmise about the less-than-intact nature of the Elves in their curses.

The literal meaning is therefore May my excrement be poured upon the naked-jawed (ones); a meaning giving the full connotation of the words would necessarily be less literal and more expressively vicious.

So at long last, there is the answer — or, at any rate, an answer, if perhaps not the fully satisfying one people may have been looking for. And if I don’t find it quite as loathsomely vile as I always assured people it was, I suppose I have noone but myself to blame for my third embarrassment.

Although there is quite a bit of Orkish in the films of The Hobbit, the vocabulary involved in the dialogue is quite small. This is for two reasons: first, the dialogue is fairly repetitive; second, the Orcs are intended to have had a fairly small vocabulary to begin with, supplementing it as needed by words from the languages of Elves, Dwarves, and Men, and also Black Speech, when that became widely used in Middle-earth again at the end of the Third Age. Even what can be considered the foundational vocabulary is itself a mélange of older borrowings, very few of which can be traced back to the aboriginal Orkish of the First Age — which was itself influenced by both Avarin and Eldarin languages, and may even have been a simplified Avarin language to begin with. One such word that might seem to have survived, in various forms, is golug “elf”; but it seems more likely that it was a revival, reimported from Black Speech. The original word, however, may well have been an alteration of the Sindarin word golodh “one of the Noldor.”

Because of the limited nature of this vocabulary, it is possible to list all of the Orkish words that have appeared in the Hobbit films thus far. Some of these words are pan-Orkish; most, however, are probably limited to the Orcs who lived at the northern end of the Misty Mountains, with a standard (if such a thing can be said to exist) originally set by the Orcs of Mount Gundabad, prior to the Dwarf and Goblin war, about 150 years before Bilbo’s journey. But the internal evidence of the language suggests that the vernaculars of several different tribes were combined to form this standard; and in the time since the war, much change and decay had already taken place, particularly the loss of final vowels, which are however retained in some situations. Here then is this short word-list, all that can (so far) be gleaned from the meager evidence.